Lesson # 2 Your Shadow Self   Now that you have come to the knowing of the basics..you  are ready for much more as a priestes of the Path of the Wise.   Have you ever thought about your "Shadow Self" ?  This is the deeper part of you that lies hidden .  Some never meet themselves in that space because they are , most often, too afraid of that part of their being.   This part of each of us is , in actuality, the negitive parts of us.  These are areas that we often refuse to acknowlege so it is never faced.  In this lesson, you are going to experience this and work it out.  It is not somethingthat can be dealt with easily so I am giving this to you as a winter project.  I would like you to journal every part ofthis journey as you bring out and actually deal with yourShadow self.  We all have to do this in orderto really know ourselves thoroughly and become the best we can in serving the Goddess in the best way we can.   The shadow is part of us that we’re ashamed of, that we don’t want people to know about. It’s that part of us that we hide away in the closet. The shadow is dark, it’s secretive, it’s primitive, it’s shrouded in mythology. And if we ignore the shadow, it tends to say, “Well, I’m going to embarrass you. I want you to notice me.�?/P> When you exhibit so-called positive and negative qualities, you are not flawed; you are complete. When you are comfortable with your shadow, when you embrace your shadow because this is how the infinite consciousness made you, then you are attractive beyond measure, and your life is an adventure. You are natural when you are comfortable with your ambiguity, and nothing is more beautiful than being natural. When you are comfortable with your body your strengths and weaknesses, you radiate simple, unaffected humanity. The whole of creation is contrast, tension, divine discontent. If there were only truth, goodness, harmony and beauty, the universe would expand and disappear. There has to be something to hold it back. If there were only the destructive inertial forces, then the universe would rapidly burn itself up into the heat death of absolute zero. It would collapse into a black hole and disappear. So there’s both. There’s the play between both; otherwise this world would not exist. To find your shadow energy, you have to be dedicated to a journey of descent. Think of this journey as going back to retrieve parts of your life that have been abandoned because you felt so ashamed or guilty about them. The anger that erupts from the shadow is attached to past events that were never resolved. Now those events are over and gone, but their emotional residue isn’t. Shame, guilt, and fear cannot be accessed by thinking. The shadow isn’t a region of thoughts and words. Even when you have a flash of memory and recall such emotions, you are using a part of the higher brain–the cortex–that cannot touch the shadow. The journey of descent begins only when you find the doorway to the lower brain, where experience is sorted out not according to reason but according to intense feelings. Adapted from The Book of Secrets by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 2004). Violence can be tamed by breaking the shadow side of your personality into manageable bits. When you have been treated unjustly or personally harmed, the natural emotion is anger. If this anger can’t get out, it festers and grows in the shadow. Lashing out when holding it back no longer works; this anger leads to a cycle of violence. This is a kind of double bind: If you lash out and return the harm done to you, you have done something evil, but if you keep the anger inside and harbor it, you can feel just as evil. Yet violence can be tamed by breaking it down into manageable bits. Negative emotions feed off certain aspects of the shadow that are very manageable: The shadow is dark. Everyone has a shadow because of the natural contrast between darkness and the light. The shadow is secret. We store impulses and feelings that we wish to keep private. The shadow is dangerous. Repressed feelings have the power to convince us that they can kill us or make us go insane. The shadow is shrouded in myth. For generations, people have seen it as the lair of dragons and monsters. The shadow is irrational. Its impulses fight against reason; they are explosive and totally willful. The shadow is primitive. It is beneath the dignity of a civilized person to explore this domain, which reeks of the smell of the prison, the lunatic asylum and a public lavatory. Negativity assumes its overwhelming power from the fact that it feeds off all these qualities at once: A secret, dark, primitive, irrational, dangerous, mythical evil is much less convincing if you break it down into one quality at a time. But this process of bringing evil down to scale won’t be convincing until you apply it to yourself. No matter how free you feel from shadow energies, they exist inside you. If they didn’t, you would be in a state of total freedom, joy, and unboundedness. You would be in unity, the state of innocence regained when the hidden energy of the shadow has been purified. Shadow energies make themselves known whenever a controlled situation turns unexpectedly anxious or causes unexpected anger or dread. If you feel guilty or ashamed of yourself after you experience these, then you have touched, however briefly, on the shadow. An eruption of irrational feeling isn’t the same as releasing them. Venting is not purification. So don’t mistake an outburst for catharsis. When a shadow energy truly leaves, there is no resistance anymore, and you see something you didn’t see before. Even though your impulses may never cross the line into violence, ordinary impulses intensify in the shadow, where you can’t see them. Whenever you hear yourself sounding resentful or angry without provocation, whenever you find yourself on the verge of tears for no reason, whenever you cannot explain why you suddenly made a rash decision, you are actually feeling the effects of energy covertly building up in the shadow. The shadow has grown used to being repressed; therefore, to access this region of the mind doesn’t happen easily. Nor is direct assault effective. The shadow knows how to resist; it can slam the door and hide its dark energy even deeper. People assume that the dark side of human nature has unstoppable power; Satan has been elevated into the equivalent of a negative God. But when it is broken down, evil turns out to be a distorted response to everyday situations. Evil is born in the gap between body and mind. There is no powerful ruler of the kingdom of evil. Satan started out as a moment of sensory input that got wildly out of hand. I hope this gives you some input in how to deal with this part of you.  Balance yourself and know that it is all a part of what IS.  When working both Light & Shadow we are complete.  We must know both sides. I would like you to explore this in all aspects and write down all the things that come to mind. Then..do the meditation I have included in this lesson.  Write an indepth essay of your experiences and what you have learned in this exploration of your Shadow Self. ~ Click here for the Meditation ~